Analysis of Ignorance



Oh happy he who cannot see
      With scientific eyes;
Who does not know how flowers grow,
      And is not planet wise;
Content to find with simple mind
      Joys as they are:
To whom a rose is just a rose,
      A star--a star.

It is not good, I deem, to brood
      On things beyond our ken;
A rustic I would live and die,
      Aloof from learned men;
And laugh and sing with zest of Spring
      In life's exultant scene,--
For vain my be philosophy,
      And what does meaning mean?

I'm talking rot,--I'm really not
      As dumb as I pretend;
But happiness, I dimly guess,
      Is what counts in the end.
To educate is to dilate
      The nerves of pain:
So let us give up books and live
      Like hinds again.

The best of wisdom surely is
      To be not overwise;
For may not thought be evil fraught,
      And truth less kind than lies?
So let me praise the golden days
      I played a gay guitar,
And deemed a rose was just a rose,
      A star--a star.


Scheme abxbxcdC xexexfaf xgxgxxxe xaxbxcdC
Poetic Form
Metre 11011101 10101 11111101 011101 10111101 1111 11011101 0101 11111111 1101101 01011101 01111 01011111 010101 11110100 011101 11011101 111101 11001101 111001 1101101 0111 11111101 1101 01110101 1111 11111101 011111 11110101 110101 01011101 0101
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 952
Words 179
Sentences 7
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 8, 8
Lines Amount 32
Letters per line (avg) 21
Words per line (avg) 5
Letters per stanza (avg) 165
Words per stanza (avg) 44
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 14, 2023

54 sec read
99

Robert William Service

Robert William Service was a poet and writer sometimes referred to as the Bard of the Yukon He is best-known for his writings on the Canadian North including the poems The Shooting of Dan McGrew The Law of the Yukon and The Cremation of Sam McGee His writing was so expressive that his readers took him for a hard-bitten old Klondike prospector not the later-arriving bank clerk he actually was Robert William Service was born 16 January 1874 in Preston England but also lived in Scotland before emigrating to Canada in 1894 Service went to the Yukon Territory in 1904 as a bank clerk and became famous for his poems about this region which are mostly in his first two books of poetry He wrote quite a bit of prose as well and worked as a reporter for some time but those writings are not nearly as well known as his poems He travelled around the world quite a bit and narrowly escaped from France at the beginning of the Second World War during which time he lived in Hollywood California He died 11 September 1958 in France Incidentally he played himself in a movie called The Spoilers starring John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich more…

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